More Information on Climate Change - NASA

So far we’ve had one international source (the IPCC) and one UK resource (the Science Museum). Now it is time for a US resource, and they don’t get much bigger or more impressive than NASA. There website contains a lot of information, well presented. It’s worth a look.

If you haven’t yet been convinced, even after reviewing data from all these sources, I’ll be back later (or tomorrow) with more information (although, to be honest, it probably won’t be new, it’ll just be presented differently) and new places to find it. Sooner or later we should be able to find a source that appeals.

If you’d like a taste of the evidence, here’s a chunk from NASA (source page):

Certain facts about Earths climate are not in dispute:

  • The heat-trapping nature of carbon dioxide and other gases was demonstrated in the mid-19th century. Their ability to affect the transfer of infrared energy through the atmosphere is the scientific basis of many JPL-designed instruments, such as AIRS. Increased levels of greenhouse gases must cause the Earth to warm in response.
  • Ice cores drawn from Greenland, Antarctica, and tropical mountain glaciers show that the Earth’s climate responds to changes in solar output, in the Earth’s orbit, and in greenhouse gas levels. They also show that in the past, large changes in climate have happened very quickly, geologically-speaking: in tens of years, not in millions or even thousands.

There’s a load more like that, and it gets progressively more depressing the more you dig into it. Have fun.

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Climate Change - Update from London's Science Museum

Ok, so if you haven’t yet managed to sift through the mountains of evidence from the IPCC site (see yesterday’s post), you can find a rather less technical explanation of the evidence for climate change here at the website of the Science Museum (London). If you think that climate change is a conspiracy consisting of scientists paid to lie to support a secret Government agenda to force us to comply with their Machiavellian plans, ask yourself why so many scientists would falsify data, concoct nonsense theories and risk ridicule and disgrace (when the conspiracy was eventually, and unavoidably, exposed) rather than simply getting on with their lives and doing some real research. Here’s a hint; it isn’t a conspiracy.

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Climate Change Conspiracy - Get the News Here

You may or may not be convinced that global warming is real, and you may or may not choose to believe that such warming is caused by human activity, but if you’re going to deny human-induced climate change the least you can do is have a look at the evidence, as presented here. Once you’ve read through this lot you’ll be familiar with the basic science, know enough to ask sensible questions and be able to dig deeper into the evidence and arguments. If you still don’t believe, at least you’ll be able to base your disbelief on rational argument. Go on, you know you want to.

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New 500 Word Review - Brasserie Blanc, Portsmouth

It’s been a while, but I have at last published another (Brasserie Blanc, Portsmouth) in my occasional series of 500 word reviews. I’m not convinced that making the number of words in the post the defining feature was a good idea, but it’s done now and I’ll stick with it for a while yet; after all, given the frequency of posts, it’s hardly a great problem.

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Report by Commission of Investigation into Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin

Report by Commission of Investigation into the handling by Church and State authorities of allegations and suspicions of child abuse against clerics of the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin.
via justice.ie

I’ve read a little of this report and I don’t really want to read any more. I was going to write something critical of the Catholic Church but it all seems rather pointless since the allegations in this report are about as serious as they can get and they don’t seem to be affecting the Pope or his senior management team one little bit.

What would we do to any other nation that behaved in this way? Sanctions, travel restrictions and asset-freezes, I think, until the accused were extradited and the organisation’s behaviour was modified. Libya paid compensation to the victims of its crimes; when will the Vatican admit responsibility and pay up?

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Upgrade to Windows 7 - Almost Complete

I am not a big fan of impulse buying - I like to consider things, weigh the benefits against the costs, investigate alternatives and, eventually, reach a balanced decision. Upgrading my home computer has, therefore, taken quite a while.

The options I considered and rejected include:

  1. MacBook of some flavour,
  2. Dell desktop,
  3. Novatech desktop,
  4. Novatech barebones system or motherboard bundle for me to build,
  5. Mesh desktop,
  6. No change whatsoever,
  7. Low voltage, low power EEE PC or similar.

Unfortunately, none of these options really gave me what I wanted - a reasonable amount of quad-core power with decent future upgrade options without a wallet-rotting price - so I settled on my tried and tested solution; buy the components from Novatech and assemble them myself. Risky, maybe, and probably more expensive than a vanilla off-the-shelf setup, but pretty much guaranteed to give me everything I wanted.

So how did it go? Well, I bought most of the stuff on Thursday afternoon and, after a quick return to Novatech to change the memory (their website mistakenly said the motherboard required DDR2 instead of DDR3) I stuck it all together on Thursday evening and that’s it, job done. There were a couple of dodgy moments, of course, like when I first turned it on and it did absolutely nothing (one power connector less than wholly connected) or when I accidentally activated ACHI (or some similar acronym) and suddenly found that Windows couldn’t be found (a quick reinstall of Windows fixed this problem). 

Apart from that it was fairly straightforward. Admittedly, confusion over the display cabling led me to spend an hour and a half trying to work out why the outer inch of the display wasn’t being used (changing to DVI from HDMI fixed that, no problem) and I have an ongoing issue with the DVD drive (it’s IDE so I can only connect one IDE hard-drive instead of two, and the power supply doesn’t have a connector for the SATA DVD drive so I can’t change to that yet and ditch the IDE one) but, all in all, it’s been easy and trouble-free.

Performance? It’s pretty good, let down only by the cheap graphics card but as I don’t play games I don’t really care (and, once the price of DirectX 11 cards has fallen a little more, an upgrade is easy). Windows 7 Home Premium works really well, the quad core AMD processor seems to be sufficiently quick and, so far, I haven’t been able to make it misbehave, slow down or stumble, which is a very big improvement over the previous incumbent. 

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MacBook Air meets bus, bus wins

via engadget.com

Carved from a single piece of aluminium it may be, but bus-proof it is not. This unfortunate MacBook Air probably won’t quality for warranty repair but at least it still works. Mostly.

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Device spells doom for superbugs - Hurrah!

Researchers have demonstrated a prototype device that can rid hands, feet, or even underarms of bacteria, including the hospital superbug MRSA.
via news.bbc.co.uk

Apparently it works by Quantum and Plasma and other weird physics stuff which I don’t really know anything about, but it looks impressive, especially the battery-powered version. Very neat.

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Have you ever flown over London at night?

Fly over London at night and you realise just how big the city is. Lit
by the sodium streetlights, it is almost all orange except for the
very centre of the city, where the lights from highrise offices turn
the town white and the buildings themselves hide the roadside lamps. How much power do we consume to light our towns? From the air, it
looks like a lot (particularly in the office blocks), but it’s
undeniably striking as you head to Heathrow Airport.

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Konnie Huq joins Indian campaign to end polio

This crippling disease is now endemic in just four countries - India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.
via news.bbc.co.uk

I haven’t the faintest idea who Konnie Huq is, but I like the idea of trying to eliminate Polio. With any luck, it’ll go the way of the dodo and smallpox in a couple of years. If we can persuade the anti-vaccination idiots to quieten down, maybe we can get rid of measles as well (I’m not holding my breath).

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